As critics all over town outdo themselves in their praise of Synetic Theater's mimed production of Antony and Cleopatra, I feel we have passed through Alice's Looking Glass into Superman's Bizarro World.   A production without words being hailed as a great theatrical event - just how are we using language today?  It may be a great show - perhaps it is better than many Shakespeare productions that have been mounted at the Lansburgh - but theater as in play it is not.

We first began down this slippery slope, I think, when The Tony Awards agreed to classify Contact - a "dance play" without words, live music, or lyrics - as a musical. And it's true that there is a history of mime in "Theater," famously in the 1950s with Beckett's Act Without Words I & II, but these are surely special cases (like John Cage's musical sounds of silence), not theater in the normal sense, i.e., understood as a play.  Take 1000 people off the street and ask them to describe a play and you'd get close to 100 percent who included the use of speech or words in his or her definition. 

This latest aberration is a reflection of our increasingly visual culture, one that prizes spectacle over substance.  Dumbing down the audience at every juncture with gesture and extravaganza, we're poorly serving the coming theatergoing generation.  What's next: canned laughter?

If "Theater," as it's being defined, can include any live event that contains drama, why not broaden the tent to include opera (they at least have words), dance, music, performance art (including stand-up comedy), and sports?  In fact, by this line of reasoning, now that I think of it, some of the very best "theater" I've seen this year took place at Strathmore and the Verizon Center. 

What the Synetic is doing - and doing quite well, as they have in the past - is mime, dance, and choreography, but not anything worthy of being called a play.  These have a family resemblance to theater, true, but the real deal, they are not.  If this doesn't past muster in your view, perhaps the problem is one of definition.  Words, words, words, are the necessary and sufficient condition for anything theatrical that can call itself a play.  As George Orwell noted, "[I]f thought can corrupt language, language can corrupt thought."  Let's think and use language clearly, if not for ourselves, then for the sake of our audiences today and those to come.    

Photo credit: MissChatter